New Zealand director Peter Jackson’sThe Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which makes its U.S. premiere on December 14, once again breathes visual life into those diminutive humanlike creatures of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels. Indeed, Jackson’s previous film adaptation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series was widely celebrated for its faithfulness to the characters—among them the humanoid dwarfs and elves—that had emerged from Tolkien’s unrestrained imagination.

Numerous other works of fantasy and fiction have featured small, humanlike creatures. The types of creatures that have been created are too many to list here, of course, but I would like to call attention to two in particular: pixies and gnomes. For, unlike Bilbo Baggins and company, the pixies and gnomes of fantasy and fiction often turn out to be deceptive and untrustworthy. Sometimes, they are just plain scary.

Pixies made their debut in English literature in Mrs. Anna Eliza Bray’s three-volume The Borders of the Tamar and the Tavy (1837). Her relation of pixie folklore having been received favorably, Mrs. Bray went on to pen A Peep at the Pixies: Or, Legends of the West (1854). In that work, she remarked on pixies’ appearance and behavior extensively, stating: “They are not like children; for, though they are small, and can sometimes be seen, it is said they can fly as well as run, and creep through key-holes, and get into the bells of flowers, and many other places where little boys and girls cannot creep.” She also says that while they can be “good,” they dabble in mischief, may harm people, “and often hurt the cattle.”

Britannica says of the little devils, “Their prank of leading people astray gave rise to the terms pixie-led and pixilated to describe a person who becomes lost on a familiar road. It was later extended to mean any state of bewilderment or confusion.” That is a state in which I found myself after having discovered that Tinker Bell of Peter Pan fame was a fairy instead of a pixie. I suspect that I was not alone in having been pixied by Disney’s portrayal of her magic lint as “pixie dust” in the 1953 animated feature film.

The gnome, in contrast to the pixie, typically is portrayed in fantasy and fiction as a deformed creature that occupies a subterranean habitat, where it guards something of importance and often controls an underworld. The perception of the gnome as a grotesque creature has been perpetuated by a number of writers, including C.S. Lewis in his series The Chronicles of Narnia: “It was a most miserable little gnome, only about three feet long. It had a sort of ridge, like a cock’s comb (only hard), on the top of its head, little pink eyes, and a mouth and chin so large and round that its face looked like that of a pigmy hippopotamus.”

Sounds cute and all, but that is not a creature I would care to encounter.